This e-ink and e-paper technology is pretty cool, because it mimics the appearance of real paper and it only consumes power when the display needs to change, but this doesn’t sound all that useful to someone who is visually impaired.

Yes, I know that the Amazon Kindle and other similar e-books can have text-to-speech features, but wouldn’t it be interesting if they were able to make a braille e-book instead?

Designers Seon-Keun Park, Byung-Min Woo, Sun-Hye Woo, and Jin-Sun Park thought so and they have dreamed up a Kindle-like device that would effectively have an e-ink like experience, except in braille. The little bumps and lines could be dynamically generated, just like e-paper, as needed.

If you’ve ever seen a braille book, you’ll see that they are typically double the thickness of a conventional book. If carrying around hundreds of e-books on a Kindle is supposed to be so much more convenient, can you imagine if an e-braille book was available for blind people?

This is certainly an interesting concept, but there’s no saying whether anyone will pick up on the idea and create a real device.